Is Pitch Information Indispensable for Music Recognition? A Pilot Study Based on a Musical Matching Pairs Game

Musical memory is essential for music cognition research. By investigating musical memory, researchers can examine and better understand how musical patterns are represented in memory. Although previous empirical studies have established the importance of pitch and rhythm in music recognition (Dowling, 1978; Dowling & Fujitani, 1970), recent research suggests that other less obvious representations like timbre may have been overlooked (McDermott et al., 2008).Further, only a few studies on musical recognition have been conducted where listeners are presented with music that they would attend to in everyday listening. To investigate the cognition of familiar music, we introduce and examine a set of three tools that can be used to probe musical memory in more naturalistic settings. These include 1) a novel corpus of television introduction tracks (TeleTunes), 2) the use of a noise vocoder to manipulate pitch in realistic music, and 3) a musical matching- pairs game testing musical memory. In this paper we demonstrate how this set of tools can be used to investigate questions of music perception and cognition in more ecological settings and lay groundwork for using the musical matching-pairs game in our future research on music and memory.